Tag: free sheet music

In the Library of Congress you can find sheet music for mandolin and guitar. This includes many arrangements of marches by John Philip Sousa for mandolin and guitar, 2 mandolins and guitar or mandolin and piano. There are also severals other pieces from the period around 1900.

In this post I have compiled the first part of sheet music, enriched by some videos of marches by Sousa.

The following sheet music editions are available for free download from the Library of Congress site:

Every year in August there is a Scottish Fiddle School on the Thompson Island close to Boston.

For one week you can learn how to play fiddle in the Scottish style, but there are also courses for guitar, cello or bagpipes, and the fiddle style of Cape Breton.

On the website of the Scottish Fiddle School you can find lists with the tunes played every year as well as a compilation of sheet music provided by the teachers for the students. For every year you can find a set of 20 – 30 selected tunes in a PDF document.

If you like to play this kind of music you can easily get enough music for the next wekks – a great collection of Scottish tunes playable on fiddle but also on the mandolin.

One of the teachers at the Scottish Fiddle Scholl is Hanneke Cassel, a great fiddle player that I have discovered some years ago. I have compiled a playlist with some interesting youtube videos with Hanneke Cassel:

Recently I have found the sheet music for mandolin of a famous march composed by Abe Holzmann: Blaze-Away. This march has been composed in the year 1901 and has remained popular until today.

From Wikipedia:

Abe Holzmann (19 August 1874 – 16 January 1939) was a German/American composer, who is most famous today for his march Blaze-Away!

A review originally published by the New York Herald on Sunday, 13t January 1901 entitled German Composer who Writes American Cakewalk Music describes “[h]is knowledge of bass and counterpoint is thorough, and his standard compositions bear the stamp of harmonic lore, which makes his proclivity for the writing of the popular style of music the more remarkable.”[3]

Abe married Isabelle Fishblatt around 1908, and he became the manager of the Orchestra Department at Jerome Remick & Company, music publisher in New York.[1] He was an early member (1923) of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). He earned his livelihood as composer/arranger for Tin Pan Alley publishers, including Leo Feist. He later was advertising manager for the American Federation of Musicians publication, International Musician. He was a member of Freemasonry, the Elks, and Knights of Pythias, all in New York City.

Holzmann died in East Orange, New Jersey at age 64. He was survived by his widow, a daughter Natalie Holzmann, three half-brothers, and four sisters. His music was especially revered by ragtime enthusiasts, although he composed marches, waltzes, and other light music.

I have found a great video with a performance of Blaze-Away by a great banjo band, recorded in the year 1936 – this has been taken from the British Pathe archive:

Blaze Away – Raymonde and his Banjo Band (1936)

The fact that Blaze-Away is popular until today can be seen in the following two videos with violinis André Rieu – and a very enthusiastic audience from Vienna and a complete football stadium in Kerkrade:

Andre Rieu – Blaze away 2011

If you like to add another popular march to your mandolin orchestra’s repertoir you might be interested in the sheet music of Blaze-Away by Abe Holzmann. The sheet music is available on my website.

The title pages of works by Abe Holzmann show the fact that Holzmann’s music has been arranged for mandolin, guitar, zither or banjo in the early days already.

Another popular composition by Abe Holzmann is Smoky Mokes. Ihave selected two videos, the first with banjo-mandolin and guitar:

Translation: Josef Kellner (1854-1911) was a teacher for zither and a composer in Munich who published his pieces from 1886 in his own publishing company. …Josef Kellner was a typical composer of popular music. Not only his Op. 7 “Deutscher Schützenfestmarsch” is found in many manuscripts of zither players and has been arranged for other groups (salon orchestra, brass band), but as well many of his Ländlers and other compositions have been included to the repertoir of the Bavarian musicians.